new directions in displacement research

A feature digital blog symposium hosted by the Displacement Research Action Network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Balakrishnan Rajagopal

“There has indeed been a veritable explosion of scholarship on evictions and displacement, concerning both the global North and South in recent years. The books discussed in this symposium mark an important new turn in the study of global urban transformations, bringing displacement and evictions to the center rather than being treated as marginal. We hope that this symposium marks the start of a deeper and more sustained study of displacement in the global North and South, including studies on countries and regions which are not the focus of the books in this symposium.” Read More

Sai Balakrishnan and Nick Blomley

"Over and above the opportunity to introduce the individual books, our hope is that the conversations open up some interesting reflections, generating both a deeper understanding of displacement issues across geographical contexts as well as shaping agendas for future research and action...." Read More

featured authors:

"The city of New Delhi has been scarred in the past two decades by the large-scale evictions of the homes of some its poorest and most vulnerable residents. The core argument of the book is these evictions mark an urban restructuring in contemporary Delhi that are sites where broader shifts in political economy, inequality and citizenship can be read. This is principally because contemporary evictions have been the result of judicial orders within what are called Public Interest Litigations filed in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India. I thus ask: what does it tells us about notions of the “public” and the possibilities of citizenship if an eviction can be seen as an act of public interest? Further, what does it mean for urban politics for the judiciary – rather than the executive – to be the agent of this transformation? In my arguments, I contend that evictions signify a moment of closure for the historical forms of political, legal, social and economic negotiations that have thus far comprised the urbanism of New Delhi as well as many cities of the global south. They mark an altered urban politics where a set of familiar referents– development, order, governance, citizens, and the public– are redefined to not only enable evictions but also to see them as acts of good governance, order and planning." Read More

"At the turn of the 21st century, however, Delhi started to be re-imagined as a so-called world-class city, a vision of a city attractive to tourists and investors and visually on par with other global cities, such as Paris and Singapore. As a result of this vision—enshrined in a new master plan released in 2007—pressure rose in the early 2000s to remove slums, most forcefully from a wave of petitions that associations of local property owners filed in the courts demanding the elimination of slum-based nuisances. As the courts started to intervene in these cases, judges were confronted with the absence of accurate maps and land records that had hamstrung slum-removal efforts over previous decades. The courts responded by shifting the epistemological basis on which they assessed space. Instead of ruling by records, they started to “rule by aesthetics,” a mode of governing space on the basis of codes of appearance—what I call in Delhi a “world-class aesthetic”—rather than through the calculative instruments of map, census and survey. Rule by Aesthetics is organized into three broad parts charting the emergence, consolidation, and contradictions of this form of aesthetic governmentality." Read More

"What a City is For was instigated by the story of Albina, an inner-city neighbourhood in Portland, Oregon that is being dramatically gentrified in the wake of an official city community plan. In 1990 three-quarters of Albina residents were Black, and by 2010, the number had fallen to less than 25 percent, and by every measure demographic and vernacular, the Black population continues to drop sharply, replaced almost one-to-one by wealthier whites. Former residents are being pushed to the far edges of the city where Portland’s famous urban successes are in slim evidence and social marginalization is exacerbated by physical isolation. This racialized displacement is startling in what is perhaps the most liberal city in America, and one consistently lionized in urban planning literatures. It is maybe of little surprise that Portland is also North America's whitest major city, and one that is being built on the entwined historical racial exclusions of Black, Chinese and Jewish people, and a long history of Indigenous land theft." Read More

"There have been lots of proclamations of global gentrification based on speculation rather than investigation. In our book we use the word ‘planetary’ to signal our critique of assertions that gentrification has simply ‘gone global’. Our use of the term ‘planetary gentrification’ is not a direct copy nor endorsement of the idea of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2012), but it does draw on some of the ideas around that (eg. Merrifield, 2013). Rather we use the word planetary to underline the new scale and scope of C21st processes of gentrification, its new found speed and its new frontiers in space, and to argue that gentrification occurs as much in endogenous ways as it emerges through global circuits of capital and policies. Read More

"When mentions of informal settlements are made in the popular press and public debate, a particular image of the slum usually comes to mind. With its seemingly endless expanse of squat, aluminum-sided, blue tarp-roofed shanties, Mumbai’s iconic settlement of Dharavi – referred to both pejoratively and affectionately as “Asia’s Largest Slum” – fits this image better than most. Visible from flights into Mumbai’s international airport and from the windows of most taxi rides into the island city, nearly all visitors to Mumbai encounter Dharavi and its romantically bustling streets, which both confirm and defy their preconceptions of the slum." Read More

Responses:

"Maybe displacement is really in the air, or it could be a coincidence that I just published an article with the word "displacement" in the title (Li 2017). I welcome this opportunity to put my work on displacement in rural Indonesia into conversation with these five books on cities, north and south. In my article I used the term displacement to draw attention to the long term, incremental processes that reduce rural peoples' access to land, work, and territorial control, in contrast to terms like land grab or eviction, which suggest a one-off event..." Read More

"We inevitably read and re-read books as present histories, relating them to times and places for which they were perhaps never intended. This wonderful compilation of books, accompanied by thoughtful essays by the authors in response to questions posed by Nicholas Blomley and Sai Balakrishnan, enable me to grapple with an urgent question which is in the air everywhere here in Los Angeles: displacement. From fierce anti-gentrification struggles in Boyle Heights to persistent efforts to preserve the tents of Skid Row, urban social movements and community-based organizations in this global city are on the frontlines of displacement..." Read More

"The literature on displacement comes at a particular historical moment. The processes of urbanization are accelerating in the developing world, while formerly declining city centers in the United States and Europe are experiencing a resurgence. City-based economic growth appears to invite displacement. City economies are characterized by repeated cycles of investment and disinvestment, with the poor, black, ethnic, and otherwise marginal being chased around the metropolitan region by the rich...." Read More

"Past scholarship has typically interpreted displacement as resulting from the exigencies of global capitalism, or as part and parcel of 'neoliberal urbanism'. Under this dominant view, displacement occurs through a relentless process of capital investment, speculation and redevelopment. It uproots people from their homes and communities as the new form of class war, and as part of ever-increasing control of capital over public policies. Loretta Lees labels this 'planetary gentrification' -- a condition that puts in train a ceaseless process of "accumulation through displacement." Read More